Nbc Cries `Uncle` At The Massacre

January 27, 1986|By Steve Daley. Chicago Tribune.

NEW ORLEANS — From the beginning of NBC Sports` ambitious 6 1/2-hour coverage of Super Bowl XX Sunday in and around the Louisiana Superdome, there was an almost palpable attempt to create a mood, an atmosphere.

The network called it ``An American Celebration.`` Americana chic might have been closer to the truth. Or ``Late Night with David Letterman`` meets Currier and Ives. The warm-and-cozy mood was reflected in the two-hour pregame show, in the trotting out of Bill Cosby and Rodney Dangerfield and Ronald Reagan, in no particular order, in every element of Super Sunday save those 60 minutes wherein the Chicago Bears strangled the New England Patriots.

The contrast between the ``Syncopated Clock`` that millions of television viewers heard ticking over the celebrated ``Silent Minute`` (yes, it ran a little longer than two minutes) during the pregame show and the violence on the Superdome floor lent a schizophrenic air to the festivities.

For all that, NBC`s effort made the best of a warm-up that was designed to be overlong (corporate greed is an element of Americana, too) and a football game that was all but over when William ``the Refrigerator`` Perry wandered into the Bears` offensive huddle for the first time.

Announcers Dick Enberg and Merlin Olsen are strictly white bread, and analyst Bob Griese is pure melba toast, but all are adept enough at talking over pictures. And the pictures supplied by director Ted Nathanson, a veteran of 10 Super Bowls, told a joyous story for a Midwestern city in waiting.

``With so many fans watching the game in bars and at parties, we`re going to be more concerned with showing people the game clock,`` executive producer Michael Weisman said before the kickoff in the Bears` 46-10 victory over the Patriots.

That decision, played out in Bridgeport taps and saloons on the Northwest Side and the mingle markets on Division Street, meant a countdown to hysteria and washed over Chicago like a summer breeze.

It was less compelling for the rest of the America that NBC was purporting to celebrate. For the network, coming in with a crew of 135, a potential $27 million in advertising revenue and hopes of a ratings record, the extended pasting meant a long evening for Weisman and his outfit.

We`re talking about a game where the officials didn`t move the first-down chains but twice for New England between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m.

We`re talking about an exercise so futile that the game clock became the most interesting chunk of technology available.

Slo-motion pictures, camera shots from the gondola above the Superdome field, ``telestraters`` with squiggly lines--all were abandoned as NBC pooh-bahs ached for the final whistle.

We`re talking about a performance so lame that it may cost the Sullivans millions when they divest themselves of the Patriots` franchise, as they may have to do in the months to come.

``We`re looking at men against boys,`` said Pete Axthelm, abandoning his usual silliness at intermission. ``If it were a fight, they`d have to stop it,`` Enberg said in the early moments of the third quarter.

By halftime, Weisman was trilling the Super Bowl Mumble. ``We feel a little like the Patriots,`` he said, talking over a 20-point deficit and the sound of channels being changed in every major TV market save one.

As it got better for Chicago and the Bears, it got worse for Olsen and Enberg. With no recognizable football game in sight, the talk in the NBC booth turned to dynasties, emotion, blather about Cinderella and the missing Prince and idle speculation about the future.

``What is appropriate to say in a game like this?`` Olsen said after the game. ``You wish the league could employ an `Uncle` rule and somehow not play the last three or four minutes.``

While Chicago reveled in the carnage, NBC presumed, and not without reason, that the rest of the country was drumming its fingers on its TV trays. Television jargon employs the phrase ``going to the yellow pad`` to describe the announcer`s description of the indescribable; i.e., a rout, a blowout. Olsen and Enberg turned to the yellow sheet at halftime.

``We went to more human factors than technical or strategic ones,`` said Enberg. ``It`s senseless to point out the intricacies of an offensive play or a defensive strategy when it really doesn`t matter.``

Some, in Chicago, would argue that less is not more, that a sterner accounting of the devastation would have been welcome, even great fun. But they`re the same folks who would have enjoyed play-by-play at the St. Valentine`s Day Massacre.

By their postgame remarks, it would seem that NBC Sports, however competent in its presentation, enjoyed Super Bowl XX about as much as the Boston Chamber of Commerce.